AN EAST Lancashire company was today set to make legal history with a ground-breaking legal challenge over fears about mad cow disease.

Great Harwood Food Products, which manufactures around 580 tonnes of MRM - Mechanically Recovered Meat - each year, claims the Government's "cave-in" over "groundless public fears" about the disease could force it to shut with the loss of 150 jobs. Around 80 per cent of its MRM is recovered from the spinal columns of cattle, the part which the Government banned the use of last year.

The company has won the right to an urgent High Court review of its complaints, and the national test case could have wide-ranging implications for the whole industry.

The move was sparked by a Government ban on the use of vertebrae bones in the MRM process - used to strip meat off cattle bones to make burgers and other convenience foods. The firm claims the Government's latest restriction is "irrational and out of all proportion to any health risks", and argues the Ministry of Agriculture had no power under European law to impose the ban.

Great Harwood Food Products is the town's largest employer with an annual turnover of around £30 million, but profits have declined in recent years.

MRM has continued to yield profits of around £230,000 a year and, if stripped of those, the company claims its viability will be under threat.

In a written application to the High Court it said there was and never had been a shred of evidence to support fears that Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy could jump from one species to another to affect the human population. Mr Justice Buxton yesterday took little time to rule that the company had "arguable" grounds for complaint, opening the way for a full judicial review, which he said should be heard as a matter of urgency.

In its application, the company said there was no scientific or even anecdotal evidence linking BSE to the extremely rare Creuzfeld-Jakob disease in humans.

It added that MRM was "perfectly safe" and a minute "theoretical" risk could only arise where slaughterhouses failed to completely remove spinal cords from carcasses.

Converted for the new archive on 14 July 2000. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.